The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this week advanced the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 by unanimous 17-0 vote.
“The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 reflects the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan commitment to ensuring America’s intelligence agencies have the resources they need to protect our country,” Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) said. “This year’s bill increases the IC’s ability to track threats posed by adversarial nations, including technological and economic competition with China. It also promotes a reform of the nation’s security classification system, strengthens the security of our election systems, and furthers the Committee’s efforts to reform the security clearance process, so that the IC can attract and expeditiously on-board a talented, diverse, and trusted workforce to meet the emerging challenges we face.”
The bill authorizes funding for and approaches the issues of the Intelligence Community from numerous avenues. For one, it increases oversight of Chinese economic practices, investments, military capabilities and more. It also seeks to streamline the country’s security classification system and improve its acquisition of emerging technologies, while increasing transparency of certain issues and maintaining congressional oversight of and protections for whistleblowers in the Intelligence Community.
If approved, the bill would also tap the IC to create a new atrocities coordinator position to chart Chinese human rights abuses, to conduct an assessment of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its implications for national and NATO security, to increase transparency of funding and reporting for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) and to strengthen voting system security through simulated attacks on them. It would also target Venezuela for any imprisonment of U.S. citizens, and guarantee support for victims of anomalous health incidents, popularized as the mysterious Havana Syndrome, for where it was first encountered.
“The United States is in a moment of great power conflict where our adversaries—namely China and Russia —are colluding to destroy the international ruled-based system while undermining the United States and our alliances,” Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) said. “The Intelligence Community (IC) must rapidly adapt and work aggressively to position the United States to focus on and counter the unprecedented global threats we face.”
As a reassurance to the public, the bill would also expressly prohibit the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis from collecting information or intelligence on U.S. persons.